Abstract

At the center of Wyndham Lewis’s aesthetics is a theory about what kind of novel resembles a machine. In his view, modern society experienced technology in terms of time, as a frenetic rhythm. Lewis sought to redefine technology as static by arguing that artworks were machines. Surprisingly, the novel was key for this project, because, like modern technology, novel reading seems to require extension in time. In what he calls the “taxi-cab driver test of fiction,” Lewis theorizes how to read a novel in an instant, without temporal extension. In arguing for the novel as a machine, Lewis imagined a possible way to change society’s experience of technology.

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